


Color Theory

by iaspis



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Banter, Canon Compliant, F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:41:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28177077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iaspis/pseuds/iaspis
Summary: Somewhere along the way, his favorite color changes.
Relationships: Fiona/Rhys (Borderlands)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	Color Theory

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still alive and writing for these two, I just lack the ability to finish my WIPs <3
> 
> enjoy.

Somewhere along the way, his favorite color changes.

Maybe it’s not unordinary. It’s happened a million times before. When he was ten, his favorite color was red. Red shoes, red jackets, red blankets on his bed. Red toys. Red pencils for school. Red, red, red. He loved red.

Then he loved pink. Red was still good, but not the best. And then he loved purple, and hated pink, and red was somewhere in the middle because red was the color of his jacket and his shoes but it was also the color swimming in the bottom of mom’s wine glass. The color of fresh bruises. Of blood stuck underneath fingernails.

Purple was the clear choice. But purple changed to orange, then to pink again. Then to black, briefly, for maybe a week before he and Vaughn got into an argument about how black isn’t even really a color.

(It totally is, for the record, but bygones are bygones.)

So then it was yellow. And it stayed yellow for a long time. All through high school. All through college. All through his internship at Hyperion, and Hyperion was made of yellow. It was all over the place. Everywhere you looked. Yellow desks and yellow guns and yellow cybernetic arms.

Rhys remembers waking up one day after being stationed on Helios and thinking, _I’m so fucking sick of yellow_.

After that, it was blue. Light, vivid blue, specifically – _not_ turquoise – but the color of a sprawling, cloudless sky. The view from Helios never fit the bill for obvious reasons, but those picturesque ads from Aquator came pretty close.

True blue. Perfect blue.

He finds it on Pandora’s horizon.

He’s not even looking for it, but when he glances up from where he’s been playing tic-tac-toe with himself and drawing dicks in the sand, there it is. Waaay off in the distance, where sky meets earth and the rest of the planet curves out of view. Everything else is dull in comparison, bleached out by the sun, except for that blue – _his_ blue – bleeding into the edges of the sky.

“The hell are you looking at, Hyperion?”

A pair of boots come to a stop on his left. Rhys looks over, and then up, and there stands Fiona with her hands on her hips and this look like she’s definitely judging the amount of phallic imagery he’s doodled in the sand.

Rhys, very nonchalantly, uses his shoe to kick some gravel over it.

“Oh, y’know, nothing in particular,” he says, and he turns back to wave a hand vaguely at the landscape rambling out around them. “Just... enjoying the view.”

“The view,” Fiona echoes, sounding a touch incredulous.

Rhys nods. “Yeah. I mean, it’s nice?”

It sounds more like a question than a statement.

After a moment, Fiona sinks down onto the ground next to him, sending a plume of sand up around her with the movement.

“The view is shit,” she asserts. Very matter-of-fact.

Rhys bites back a grin. “I don’t know if I’d go that far.”

“Sure you would. Just look around,” she says, gesturing at everything as if to add to the point. “It’s just sand and dirt and then more sand. Not exactly postcard material, if you ask me.”

Rhys shrugs. “You’d be surprised.”

“Oh, really.”

“I dunno. Some people find it appealing. The whole... vapid wasteland thing. A chance to find some peace and quiet.”

“Right,” Fiona snorts. She picks up the stick he’d been drawing with and sketches out a little grid in the sand. “Because _that’s_ what Pandora’s known for. The ‘peace and quiet’.”

Rhys watches as Fiona draws an _X_ in the top middle square of the grid. He accepts the stick from her when she holds it out for him to take.

“Well, if it wasn’t for all the skags,” Rhys says, marking an _O_ in the lower right square. “And the bullymongs. And the rakk hives.”

“And the bandits,” Fiona says.

“And the bandits,” Rhys agrees.

Fiona’s lips twitch a little. He hands the stick back and she adds another _X_ to the right of the first.

“If it wasn’t for all that,” Rhys continues, “maybe it would actually be kinda nice.”

He looks up at the horizon again. At the endless stretch of desert unfolding across the earth. It’s like a canvas, almost, primed and ready for paint.

Or maybe it’s already been painted. Maybe he just hasn’t been looking close enough, or in the right places. The sky is a testament to that, if such a fathomless shade of blue can endure even under the swell of Pandora’s sun. 

“Your move,” says Fiona.

Rhys glances over, and then back down, and then he takes the stick.

And then he glances over again.

The thing is, he’s never liked green. He’s liked maybe every other color _but_ green, because green is... well, it’s lukewarm. It’s the color of grass and trees and algae on a hot summer lake. It’s seafoam and dirty tennis balls. It’s his veins trapped inside his skin.

It’s the color of pears, which he’s allergic to. His history books in high school were always green, and damn if every history teacher he ever had hadn’t always acted like a massive douche.

Green is tepid. Muted. It’s in the background, just _there_.

But he looks at her, and she looks back, and suddenly green is all he can see.

“If tic-tac-toe is too much for you, then you might want to seriously rethink this whole Vault hunting gig,” Fiona teases at length. “I don’t think the Traveler will go easy on you like I do.”

She leans back on her hands, eyes warm and pale and green, green, _green_.

Rhys turns to the grid. He circles in an _O_ in the top left square, blocking her win.

“You don’t go easy on me,” he says, past the hard little knot that’s threading upwards from the depths of his chest.

“I don’t,” she agrees, snatching the stick back and drawing an _X_ right smack in the middle square.

She’s got him cornered. Whether he blocks her diagonally or straight down doesn’t make a difference. Either way, he’s going to lose.

But that’s how it is with her, isn’t it? He’s always two steps behind, always falling into the same pitfalls so she can turn out with the upper hand.

Losing. Always losing. And yet, somehow, never feeling like he’s lost anything at all.

Rhys fills in the lower left square with an _O_. Fiona swiftly marks an _X_ to the right of it, claiming victory.

“Two out of three?” she asks, canting her head to the side.

Rhys pauses, holding her gaze. He wonders if she knows. If she can tell. If it’s written all over his face that something’s shifted now, and that if he looked back out at that horizon, the blue he found there will have lost its luster.

If it’s obvious, she doesn’t say. She just waits for his answer, already setting up another game.

“Yeah,” Rhys finally says. “Two out of three.”

Because after all, what’s an untouchable sky compared to her? Vast and endless, full of stars but even so, he doesn’t care to watch them dance like her eyes do when he tells her yes.


End file.
